Thank you for reading! No update next week (holiday chaos), but I'll be back in the new year. Celebrate safely!
Thane watched as Shepard and Liara embraced, noticing the way Liara's touch lingered on Shepard's shoulder. Tali and Liara nodded at each other cordially, but no embrace there. Tali preferred not to be touched—while the environmental suit protected her from most viruses, she liked to be cautious.
Shepard turned toward him. "Liara, Thane Krios. Thane, Liara."
"A pleasure. Your reputation is … impressive," Liara said. Her eyes were on him, measuring him, and he felt certain that she knew exactly what lay between himself and Shepard. Did she find him a threat? He knew she had made advances on Shepard when they were shipmates aboard the Normandy, and he had gathered from remarks of Shepard's that she was not indifferent to the asari's attractions. He felt a quickening of his pulse, a sense of alarm. Shepard cared for him; she had said so. But he had rejected her, fled from her room unable to touch her, too afraid that to take what he wanted was to open them both up to fear and pain and sorrow. She had forgiven him, but the impasse was still there. Was he being selfish to feel possessive when he couldn't actually possess her?
He kept his face, he hoped, impassive, as Shepard took a seat in front of Liara's desk. He motioned Tali to the extra seat, and took up a post by the door himself—conveniently where he could watch Liara but Shepard couldn't watch him.
"Tell me what brings you to Illium, my friend," Liara said. "Knowing you, it cannot be a visit simply to say hello."
"No. I have information on the Shadow Broker—where to find him, and how to get to him."
Liara caught her breath sharply. "I won't ask how you came by such a thing. If it were anyone but you, I'd suspect a trap, but …" She studied Shepard closely. "You are the same as you ever were, and I … Too much has occurred not to change me."
"Maybe I can help. If we go after the Shadow Broker together …"
"Perhaps. Let me see what you've got?"
Shepard handed a datapad across the desk. Liara punched some buttons on it, frowning. "This looks like a leaked transmission between Shadow Broker operatives. Some hints as to the location, and—" She gasped sharply. "Feron. He's still alive."
"Feron?" Shepard asked.
Staring at the screen, Liara nodded. "He was … a friend. He helped me recover your body from the Shadow Broker."
"What?!"
Liara looked up, her eyes meeting Shepard's. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize—of course you wouldn't know."
"The Shadow Broker had my body? Why?"
"He was going to sell you to the Collectors. But Feron and I stopped him. Feron sacrificed himself to save me."
"How did you know that?"
"I am an information dealer, Shepard."
"But you weren't at the time."
"Many things changed when you died. I … couldn't stop thinking about you. I went looking for you, but someone else had been there first, and I—I had to know who. And why."
"That would explain why the Collectors are so obsessed with you, Shepard," Tali said.
"I suppose." Shepard leaned forward. "If you rescued me, how did I end up with Cerberus?"
"It was Cerberus who gave me the intel needed to find you. They were the ones who put Feron with me in the first place. And when I got out, they said—they said they could bring you back. So I gave you to them."
"You believed them?"
"What was the alternative? To accept that you were dead and gone? Any hope was better than that."
Thane could sympathize. Had someone offered him a way to bring Irikah back, he could not have refused.
"Well." Shepard cleared her throat. "Thank you for that. I … had no idea."
"Neither did I," Tali added. "I would have helped you."
"You had gone home to your people," Liara told her. "They needed you. I— With my mother gone, and Shepard, and my research on the Protheans no longer necessary, I had a great deal of free time on my hands." She looked at Shepard. "I didn't know how you would feel when Cerberus restored you, if you'd feel betrayed, or …"
Shepard gave a swift, meaningful look at Thane over her shoulder, and turned back to Liara. "It's always worth having another chance."
Liara glanced briefly at Thane as well, her face expressionless, and then looked down at the datapad again. "And now you're giving me another chance to find Feron. After two years … I hadn't even dreamed he might still be alive."
"You were close?" Shepard asked. Thane tried to interpret her tone. Was she jealous?
"Yes. Even though he betrayed me more than once, double-dealing for Cerberus, for the Shadow Broker … But in the end he sacrificed himself for me. I owe him."
"It sounds like I owe him, too," Shepard said. "What do we do now?"
It was odd to hear her looking to someone else for the plan, so odd that none of the other three spoke for a moment. Then Liara shook herself, looking up from the datapad. "I need to go home, to gather some of the data I've collected, to think about what it means and how to proceed." She stood up, closing her eyes briefly and shaking her head. "I have spent two years plotting revenge. Now it appears I must plan a rescue. It will take some consideration."
Shepard got up, too. "Take your time."
Liara smiled. "But not too much time. After all, do you not have a galaxy to save? Come by my apartment tonight. Hopefully I'll have a plan by then."
Thane bristled. Her apartment? He wasn't sure why he felt so incredibly threatened by this asari, when he would have cheerfully been faced with Kaidan Alenko and not blinked an eyelid. But Kaidan had rejected Shepard, where Liara had saved her. Kaidan was a known quantity, and Liara was a mystery.
"We'll see you there," Shepard assured her. Thane couldn't see Liara's face in reaction, and he wondered. And then he felt badly—the asari was concerned about a lost friend, not about getting Shepard into a romantic situation. He was doing them all a disservice by allowing these thoughts. But even as he told himself so, as Liara left the room, he still felt disquieted and uncertain, feelings that were beneath him, and beneath Shepard, and uncalled for given his inability to commit himself fully to his own emotions, but which he nevertheless could not seem to quell.
They arrived at Liara's apartment later that night, Garrus in tow instead of Tali, to discover that the asari had gone missing. There was evidence of an attack—bullet holes through the windows, spreading cracks across the glass. And another asari, calling herself Tela Vasir and claiming to be a Spectre, was there before them, searching the apartment for clues to Liara's whereabouts.
Thane was concerned. Not that he knew every Spectre in the galaxy—only the Council did—but he had never heard of this one, and it seemed strange that she had arrived before they had.
As they toured Liara's apartment, he couldn't help but notice how many of her personal possessions came from, or called back to, her time on the Normandy, including a piece of the mangled armor Shepard had died in. A morbid memento, to be sure. Thane had several items stored away that reminded him of Irikah, but he wouldn't have thought to keep the clothes she was wearing when she was killed, even if he had been there at the time. But possibly Liara had not had the opportunity to keep anything else of Shepard's, he thought more charitably. Even Shepard had very little of her own belongings. She had left a few things for safekeeping with Councilman Anderson, but everything else had been destroyed along with the first Normandy. So Liara had clung to the only tangible thing she had to remind her of the best time in her life. In her position, would he not do the same?
Watching Shepard, her brow furrowed in concentration as she followed the clues Liara had left behind in order to be able to track her friend, it was clear that the affection was mutual. Thane told himself he had no reason to feel threatened—after all, Shepard would have felt the same about Garrus, or Tali, and he didn't feel threatened by either of them—but he did, for all of that.